One swallow

Well the may is out, but I am not ready to cast a clout.  Old country sayings are often misunderstood, and Ne'er cast a clout 'til May is out,  probably the most misinterpreted. May refers not to the month but to the blossom of the hawthorn tree which usually emerges in that month. May blossom is one of the most beautiful and though relatively short lived, it brightens the hedgerows and gives a promise of summer to come. The smell is sweet and pungent and perhaps not to everyone's taste  but I love it when the sun shines and that smell oozes through the country lanes.
I saw the first swallow this morning;  Just the one; it was swooping around the old pub that is being demolished just over the road. It was probably looking for last year's nesting site and saw no point in hanging around. Maybe it is coincidental that at last the sun has emerged momentarily, that signs of summer are beginning to appear.
As a boy I loved the spring, and still do. I remember woods carpeted with bluebells, or primroses, madly reproducing and growing before the canopies of the trees shaded them out. Meadows full of cowslips and buttercups and of course the migratory birds including the cuckoo. Nowadays it is rare to hear the cuckoo and it's numbers are depleted probably due to lack of suitable habitats for it's hosts to nest in, or maybe the host birds are getting better at hiding. Either way the cuckoo may be on its way to extinction.  Those familiar with its song will probably miss it but for many, it will pass like so many species have before, unnoticed.  Extinction is a fact of life, and any species that fails to adapt to change is doomed.
I am enjoying  this spring in a new habitat. I have left the coast and am revelling in a fertile and species rich location. I grew up by a river and there is a smaller but similar stream just along the road and my walks take me back, re-introducing wildlife that I had almost forgotten. I am told that there are kingfishers there and maybe one day I will get up early enough to see one.  Before that though I will wait until it is warm enough to cast that clout.

Sport

There is a very lovely woodland walk close to here. It meanders along the banks of a small river, through a mix of mature oaks and coppiced hazels. I have become fond of daily strolls along there, often with a sleeping Oscar in his push chair. The other day I stopped a while to watch a game of football between tow teams of thirty or forty somethings and was pleasantly surprised at the entertainment value of the game being played between two teams both eager to win despite the lack of financial incentives. There was a small cluster of spectators, enjoying themselves despite the inclemency of the weather, and I was reminded of the true nature of sport. There were no dives, no arguments with the referee, and no aggressiveness on the pitch.

We are unfortunately hosting the Olympic games this year. It is not just premiership football that has lost direction it seems. Sport at it's highest level has moved so far away from what most of us were brought up with, and the Olympics are nothing more than a vast money machine in which highly paid athletes meet on an international stage attempting to generate national pride for their homelands.

This year's olympics are beginning to look like a military operation, with ground to air rockets, defensive radar installations, armed police, troops on high alert and goodness knows what else being installed at great expense. I am sure that huge sums of cash will be spent on opening and closing ceremonies, in attempts to outshine previous nations attempts at impressing the watching world. Tickets for most events are already sold at very high prices and many, will almost certainly have been acquired  by various means by touts who will be selling them for even higher prices as the games get closer.  Our airports are already stretched to breaking point with huge queues at immigration, and this summer, things will get so much worse.

We are a country in dire financial straits and yet we are spending billions to provide a showcase for thousands of professional athletes to do what they are trained to do and have dedicated their lives to. There will be tens of thousands of drug tests, necessary because so many competitors have, in the past, cheated their way to success. Now the cheats are finding ways of avoiding detection in our win at any cost world.

I have no idea who won the game at the weekend. I have no idea who was playing whom, and frankly it didn't matter. I imagine that it mattered to those on the pitch, but I am sure that the manager of the losing team was not sacked nor hounded by the press because his team did not win. The only true sport takes place at an amateur level.

Targets aims and objectives

When I was a kid, just a few years ago, I worked on the land during each and every school holiday. I picked plums, apples, pears, strawberries, raspberries, beans, peas, and for one miserable week I pulled beetroot and filled wet hessian sacks in the rain.  I even worked on wheat harvests, hauling hundredweight sacks by hand, and spent many long summer evenings bringing in hay from the fields. In those days, no-one mentioned targets probably because they were implicit and in jobs that were piecework, self imposed. You could spend all day in an orchard and fill as few or as many boxes as you liked. You only got paid for what you did. Self imposed targets work well as they are often linked to incentives rather than threats.
I did take on jobs that had targets imposed by physical means. One summer I worked in a cannery, and spent a long time getting to know broad beans. My first job was on the machine that removed the beans from their pods. The beans arrived from the fields in sacks piled onto pallets. I emptied the sacks into the machine and my target was to empty the pallet before the next one arrived. Failure to do so meant a backlog and that encouraged the management to start paying attention. Those that picked the beans also had targets; they were paid by weight and each bag had to hold the same amount. That target was occasionally met by putting bricks into the bags along with the beans. This did wonders for the machinery and we were supposed to make sure that bricks did not get past us. That of course meant we had to work slower and so the pickers bypassing their targets meant that it was harder for us to hit ours, and when bricks got into the viners, the whole line would come to a halt while screens were repaired.
We live in a society where targets seem to have become the be all and end all. Schools have to ensure that a set percentage of students pass their exams within certain set grade boundaries. Failure is penalised by OFSTED and the media. OFSTED operates on the misguided notion that all year groups are identical. Those who have worked in education know that this is not the case - there are good years and there are bad years, and this makes it very difficult to meet targets that someone festering in an office somewhere has dreamed up and imposed on everyone.
The health service has become hide bound by government targets. It is all very well to insist that a patient must be seen within a very short time frame and would be admirable as an aim if there were sufficient staff to meet that target. As it happens the target is being met by and large but the attention that patients receive has probably deteriorated, as health workers are so busy filling in forms and hurrying queues through the doors.  Nurses are no longer carers as they once were; they too are busy,  polishing their degrees and writing reports; patients get in the way.
Imposition of targets on people who are already working hard is counterproductive, and there needs to be a rethink on public service contracts in particular. Working with people is not like working with machinery or with bank balances and it is unfair of any government to fail to take into account the fact that people are individuals and cannot be relied upon to perform in predictable ways.
Let people set their own targets and maybe performances will improve.

A tidy desk shows a tidy mind - Mine is empty

I am trying to better myself. Physically that is not going to happen I know. I will never be athletic again, if indeed I ever was but my mind could do with  a great deal of improvement. This week I vowed to enhance some of the few skills that I have and decided to learn coding.  I have some books on C and Perl and one or two other languages and chose to make an attempt at C. I read through chapter one quite happily and understood most of it. Chapter two made me realise that I need a compiler so that any code I choose to write can be made accessible to my computer. Chapter three made me realise that the book assumed that I had a PC and not a Mac. At this point, my helicopter of a brain lost interest and I moved on.
Whilst watching dinosaur movies with Oscar on Youtube, I noticed reference to a 3D animation program called Blender. This is free - a major consideration these days, and so I downloaded it and printed out a 36 page introductory tutorial. Thereby hangs a tale of woe. I sent the file to the printer and waited. The printer insisted that there was no paper and so refused to do the job. (Yes we have all been there!), so i spent a couple of hours trying to sort that problem. It turns out that the file was demanding premium paper and that goes in a different part of the printer and that was empty because I don't have any of that type. I tried converting the file into a PDF and sending that, but by this time the printer was constipated and sulking, and so i gave up and reverted to my old printer and at long last got the printout I required.  I sat down for a session, opened the program and the tutorial page one.  Of course there was very little relationship between the tutorial and reality. The screen looked totally different and I find that a numeric keypad is essential - I don't have one. Now I am spending hours looking for fixes so that I can make a start. It has since dawned on me that the tutorial that I printed out is for a PC - no wonder I can't make it work.
Maybe my mind is not meant to be improved or maybe it is just too late. Perhaps I should have listened to what my teachers said rather than go my own way and do my own thing.  Maybe I should go for the physical improvement after all. Yes that's it - this week I'll have my hair cut.

Aid?

I am bloody cold. We are having the central heating boiler replaced and it is a three day job so we have no  heat at all.  As is often the case the job has turned out to be fraught with problems and the one that they are struggling with as I shiver and type, is how to get the gas supply to the boiler. I suggested a wireless link but unfortunately for some reason that won't work. I am told that by the end of the day we should be up and running though. Hmmmmm we'll see on that one. In the meantime my core temperature is dropping and I am not a happy chappie.
It does make me wonder why some people become polar explorers or mountaineers, putting their lives at risk in freezing conditions and for what? To go to places that so many have been before, just to say that they did it too? It might make some sense if they were to venture into new territories but apparently places like Everest are becoming pretty crowded and there is a waiting list to go up. Pretty soon McDonalds will be opening a branch up there.
Talking of Everest, I see that India has launched a test ICBM in order to flex their muscles at the Chinese and other Asian neighbours. Now that strikes me as expensive posturing and almost as pointless as climbing Everest. What is more, India is the biggest single recipient of foreign aid from the UK. That means that we, whilst struggling in economic adversity, are paying India to niggle the Chinese. One can only hope that the Chinese don't know that we are footing the bill. How embarrassing it would be if they knew that we were so stupid.
Anyhow, venting my spleen is not helping my thermoregulation as I hoped it might. Maybe I'll walk around a bit or even try a press up. It's either that or set fire to something and that might be seen as inflammatory.

A note to readers

I welcome readers and critics but please note that I am not looking for a romantic link with a woman (or a Man) from Russia or any other eastern or western nation. Neither do i wish to buy whatever you are selling whatever your race colour or creed.

Here we go again

Life seems to revolve around builders, plumbers and electricians. As I write, a lean to roof off the kitchen is being replaced. Between buying and moving in a large hole appeared in the aforementioned roof and it can only be a matter of time before it rains.

It has been a difficult period for our beloved government. It would seem that everything that they turn their hands to is falling apart, and each gaffe is quickly followed by a new one that eclipses those that have gone before. To say I told you so would be smug and so I won't. Desperation now seems the order of the day, and now Mr Cameron is aligning himself, just like a US President, with so called Christian values. In a week when a lunatic has won a landslide election victory thanks to the support of a Muslim majority population, it would seem to be rather silly to appear to be backing a minority group or claiming that Christian philosophy is what is missing from the big society. The so called big society is a myth that has no place within Tory policy or thinking and to hijack the foundering Church of England in order to save their skins is a real sign of weakness.

As a nation we are supposed to be proud of our freedoms. Human rights and freedoms are also a myth. We are free to do what? We are free only to do as we are told by those in power and free to do what we can afford. Those freedoms are progressively curtailed as the favoured few feather their nests at the expense of the rest of us and even the so called freedom to speak one's mind is a luxury that few can afford to exercise. If I criticise a women's group or even an individual bearer of two X chromosomes, I am branded as sexist. If I dared to speak to a child I could be branded as a paedophile and should I have the temerity to express an opinion about Islam, I am branded as racist. Strangely I can criticise any other religion with impugnity but none of us dare to condemn the fastest growing religion/political system in the world. Any politician dealing with Islamic groups must do so as if walking on eggshells and as a result they get away with murder - quite literally in so many cases. I am no racist and though I love children, I am no paedophile either, but I do object strongly to any political philosophy that oppresses its subjects and removes their right to think for themselves. The tories haven't got there yet but it can only be a matter of time before we have a mosque in Downing Street.

Mr Cameron is trying hard to patch his roof, to shore up his walls and to restore the edifice of government to something worthy of respect. Soon it has to rain and I suspect that his builders are cowboys. I hope that mine are more reliable and less corrupt.

Another sunny day

Such a lot has happened since I last wrote here. The main event has been a major relocation, and i am now no longer a resident of the isle of Wight. The move to Kent went well and the new house seems like home, despite its tendency to absorb money much faster than I can keep track of.
So I have left behind a lot. Friends, some of whom I have known for decades, I know that I will probably never see again, and as I am not overly socially inclined, I suspect that I amy not find making new ones at all easy.
Change is sometimes difficult and I know that I must make a lot of adjustments to my way of thinking as well as my day to day living. I have already changed my dentist, my doctor and soon my hairdresser. That will be strange indeed as I have had the same one for as long as i can remember. Her job has got easier as my hair has reduced in length and density over the years. We are well located for most of the essential services and all but the dentist is an easy walk from here.
We have a huge basement/garage and that has been a real bonus. Much of the boxes went down there in the first instance and so unpacking could take place at a leisurely rate and rubbish could remain unseen until disposal became necessary. The sun has shone since we have been here and the garden, although in need of TLC is coming on nicely. We have a much improved broadband and TV package - goodbye Mr Murdoch and hello Mr Branson, and now we await the first big job - the replacement of the boiler. My word that makes a big hole in the bank balance! Then it is a new kitchen and bathroom - everything else will have to take its place in a long line.
I seem to be constantly tired. Part of that is the amount of physical labour and the stairs, but I also caught a nasty bug from Oscar. He safely negotiated his second birthday and has recovered from his infection, mine remains and I look forward to feeling good again one day soon.
I have tried to keep abreast of world events and must give some thought to the implications of Bradford West electing a lunatic. I don't suppose though that George Galloway is any worse that Cameron or Clegg and is no more dangerous than Boris Johnson. TIme will tell.

Antipodean trip

I think that the jet lag has just about gone now, though I am still waking up far too early in the mornings. New Zealand is so very far away both in space and time and it is hard to imagine that just over a week ago I was still there.
We flew via Hong Kong this time and had a couple of days stopover there. I have never felt so tall as I did in Hong Kong. A fascinating city that gives a little insight into the Chinese culture. People there are so polite and friendly; I guess with the degree of crowding that they experience it is a necessity to try to get on with everyone. Enduring memories of Hong Kong are the smells and sounds as much as anything else. I was happy to escape the smells of cooked meat of dubious origin and flew into Auckland on a bright and sunny day. So nice to escape the february cold and dark and to feel the warm sunshine. From there another flight on a tiny prop plane up the Whangerei and a few days touring the northern tip including a coach trip along the ninety mile beach up to Cape Reinga. We learned a lot about the Maori culture as seen from the Maori point of view; non Maoris have quite a different take on things.
Two more flights down to Blenheim and then a long drive to Christchurch for a few days, back to Blenheim and then another long drive to Titirangi for a long weekend in a shearers hut, daily fishing trips out in the sounds, and much feasting and drinking of wine. Back to Blenheim; visits to beer festivals, wine festivals and various wineries, a helicopter flight over the sounds and then the long journey home having missed the freezing cold weather.
New Zealand is changed since my last trip there, it seems more up to date than it was. Having said that, it is not a place that I would wish to live. It has magnificent scenery everywhere, and clean well designed towns and cities. It has good roads and affordable housing, it has rugby as a national obsession and then there is the wine industry that is taking over many parts. Vinyards are huge, one alone, the Yealands estate, has four square miles of vines. There is a danger of monoculture which is both risky and uninteresting.
However it is a great place to visit and I take away some wonderful memories. Now back to reality and the packing up of the house for a move next week.

2012

This is supposed to be the year that the world ends, according to the Mayans. Of course they didn't see their own end coming and that does not give their prediction a lot of clout. However, there is much going on that does give some credence to such a possibilty.

Personally, 2012 has not been a great year. I have been ill for the last three weeks and this week, with just one week to go until the move, our buyers backed down and so we go back to square one. The following day, Mother in law, who was in a care home for a couple of weeks respite care, fell and broke her hip. She is 86 and such things at her age are not to be taken lightly. She was struggling to look after herself as it was, so goodness knows what will happen now.

Globally we have the American Republicans and the Muslims - two groups of fundamental religious maniacs, both utterly convinced that their god is on their side and that the modus vivendi is written down in ancient ramblings of middle eastern mystics. They use their religions to justify anything at all and i am not sure which is the scariest. It would seem that the republicans are on the rise - surfing a wave of greed that epitomises the American way of life, and their dog eat dog philosophy has to be a recipe for disaster.

And then of course there is North Korea. A nation so far suppressed that they don't know they are suppressed. Maybe the word was removed from the dictionary. The population seems happy to starve while supporting the second biggest army in the world and an arsenal of weapons that makes even China nervous.

We have the former Soviet Union, broken into corrupt and despotic states and the whole of Africa that seems ungovernable and which is ready to be taken over by Islamists. While over here, economic doom and gloom is exacerbating the gulf between the rich and poor and the vast majority are bathing in a prolonged and apathetic stupour, knowing that whatever government we have, only ever represents the interests of the few.

Maybe the Mayans got it right.

Happy New Year

So another year begins, gilded with optimism and ambition. Huge life changing resolutions have been considered, sincerely made or rejected, and many already broken. We live in the hope that things will get better, but experience teaches us that this is an illusion, and that in reality, things are likely to deteriorate for most of us. While the haves are feathering their nests, and continue so to do even in the bleakest of times, the have nots will continue to struggle, fighting for the crumbs handed out in the name of charity. Nothing much has changed in the post war era. Balances of power have shifted and technology has advanced far more speedily than people’s ability to cope with it.

I once had a Scooter. It was an old Lambretta, that I bought for two pounds from someone who must have felt that they had done really well. It worked, though never manage to break any speed limits. It was for me the greatest technological item that I owned. It was a foothold on a new kind of freedom, and I loved it. I even understood how it worked. I was familiar with pistons, spark plugs, gearboxes and brakes. I could even do routine maintenance and could recognise faults and manage basic repairs. Ok my knowledge and abilities were at a basic level but there was no sense of mystery.

When I open the bonnet of my car, to check the oil or refill the windscreen washer, I know that the underlying propulsion system is fundamentally the same as my old scooter, I recognise little that is packed so neatly into that space. Should anything go wrong under there, I am completely at a loss as to what to do. The same applies to virtually every mechanical device that I use today. Even a toaster has become impossible to maintain. No-one is interested in repairing and so we just replace anything that fails.

I am of course sitting at my computer and always grateful for the fact that it is a Mac and therefore more reliable than most. For the majority of us the workings of these machines will always remain a total mystery. While I do understand the basic principles of memory chips and the logic systems of programming languages, I have about as much chance of repairing a computer as I have of doing an oil change on a Jumbo Jet. Most people have no understanding of binary notation and some will never manage denary either. Computers left the man in the street behind, decades ago, just as we were coming to terms with BBC Basic or the Sinclair ZX80. Technology rules the world and the technocrats of course have absolute power.

This year, technology will zoom forward yet again and the helpless humans will wallow in the wake, making use of what we are given and becoming increasingly more reliant on systems and programs that we understand less and less. People will continue to kill people, others will destroy the environment for their own personal gain, cities and towns will become more crowded and retail traders will continue to fail, draining the high streets and enhancing the prospects of the Amazons and other online businesses. The poor will get poorer and the wealthy won’t care at all. The status quo for some will be maintained but one day, this fragile entity that we call society will fall apart. All we can hope is that this is not the year.

Traditions - do we need them?

Traditions are habits, behaviours or ways of thinking that are passed on from generation to generation. Modern Biology refers to these phenomena as Memes and there is now a branch of science called Memetics. They are elements of what we call culture and each culture has its own set of traditions.

One such group of traditions we call Christmas. This is in essence a midwinter festival that was hijacked by the church as another means of manipulating the poor. Now that the church has lost most of its power, the reins have been handed over to the world of commerce with all the might of the media behind it. Christmas is huge business and still the poor are the ones who are being manipulated. The have nots are encouraged to spend what they do not have in order to accumulate the trappings of what the media tell them they want, and the financiers allow them to max out credit cards in order to pay for it. People already in debt, exacerbate their situation each year by going along with the herd in the hope that they can clear the debt before next Christmas.

It is such a silly season with people buying stuff for others, largely stuff that no-one wants or needs. Fortunes are spent sending greetings cards around the world, often to people that we barely know, let alone care about. Why do we do it? So many people loathe the whole festival these days; even the churches fill up with once a year worshipers who only go because it is traditional. Nowadays it is likely that a midnight mass will turn out to be a drunken brawl, as getting drunk and fighting are seen by some to be traditional. Even priests were brawling in Greece this year.

We also seem to be accumulating traditions. Covering your house with gaudy tasteless illuminated decoration has spread from somewhere; probably America, the seat of tastelessness. We are supposed to be concerned with energy efficiency and yet millions of Megawatts are wasted each year in high streets, stores and on the houses of so many. Those people would not go around wearing a tee shirt with “I am a twat” written on the front and yet they will adorn their houses with frosty the snowman or inflatable Santa Clauses, sucking energy from the National grid like hungry leeches. No doubt the huge energy bills will add to the ever increasing debt.

It has become a season of greed and selfishness. It perpetuates the consumer society and is one cause of misery for so many. It is a bone of contention between faith groups, and therefore another cause of dispute and lack of understanding. Rubbing any aspect of religion into people’s faces is wrong, traditional or not.

The end of the year

Another year has passed and the world is no better a place than it ever has been. The human race remains stupid, greedy and divided, and those divisions have little to do with geography and much to do with philosophy. In Douglas Adams' Hitchikers guide to the galaxy, there is a philosopher's strike, which though seemingly idiotic, would in many ways be a wonderful reality. Philosophy is by it's very nature divisive and has been the root cause of so much suffering. Philosophy gives us religion and it gave us communism. It gives us Conservatism and Socialism, it gave the wealthy excuses for the perpetuation of the class system that still lies like a canker at the heart of our society. Any philosophical system asserts an authority that is undeserved, and yet people follow in their droves, content to allow other, "cleverer" people to think for them. In the west, we value freedom of speech and freedom of thought, and yet there is precious little evidence for the latter in the bulk of the population. We switch on the TV and accept what we are told, trudging ever onwards towards whatever the capitalist system offers.

The end of the year has been stress filled for so many people who have seen their incomes devalued or even being taken away, thanks largely to a system that is based on greed and gambling with other people's livelihoods. We have a government that serves only the wealthy whilst claiming that we are all in this mess together, and yet there seems to be no alternative. We are in a hole and yet we keep digging, hoping to find treasure.

I am moving house. At least I hope so. Our fates lie in the hands of the solicitors who make money out of us by shuffling paper. Documents are sent out via email, printed out by clients, signed and posted to them. They seem to do no chasing up, leaving all phone calls to the clients. I am sure that they do something but it seems that they are taking a lot of money for a service that has seen better days.

I will be sorry to leave this Island. I have spent forty years here and it feels like home. However, the crossing to the mainland is so expensive and at present so frequent, that it makes sense, economically and familywise to make the move while we are still capable. So this could be my last entry from this side of the water. Thank you for taking minutes of your life to read this, and I do wish you a happy holiday and the very best luck for next year.

Moving on

I have lived in the same town since 1971, and now it is time to move The great stimulus being Oscar of course. At 20 months he has a huge pull and it will be so nice to spend more time with him. (I think)
So the house is in a state of chaos, even though we do not have a moving date, there is so much that needs sorting and rationalising. So much clutter accumulates with time and i am a hoarder - I can't seem to throw anything away on the basis that i deplore waste. However, black bags are filling and being dispatched to the appropriate places. Charity shops are benefitting and through local freecycle groups, individuals too are making use of stuff that I have been hanging on to.
There is sadness and joy associated with such a big upheaval. It has been a long time since i experienced mainland life and no doubt there will be a change in pace that I will need to acclimatise to, though I will probably stay at home just as much as I do now.
However, there will be new opportunities of course and I am sure that babysitting skills will be called upon frequently.
I will miss friends that I have known for a long time and maybe there will be new ones, but I am not good at socialising so we shall see what happens there.
On the whole I feel that it is the right thing to do and that this is the right time. I now await the legal processing to be completed before we get a date for completion - I just hope that it doesn't take too long.

He is growing up

baby boomers

So Michael Jackson's family are planning a series of law suits, blaming everyone in sight for the shortcomings and death of their famous cash cow. They must be obscenely wealthy already and yet rather than grieve the loss of their relative, they are grasping for yet more money. They are representative of the avaricious unpleasant society that we live in today.
Those of us born in the years immediately following the second world war are referred to as the baby boomer generation, and are being held responsible for the current state of the world. Every generation blames the one that came before, and so I guess that the current younger generation will one day be held accountable too, probably for the appalling quality of music as well as the debt ridden state of the nation.
As a child, I, and many of my own generation, was brought up to abhor debt. If you wanted something, you worked and saved until you could afford it. People saved money all year long so that they could afford christmas. Summer holidays were almost unheard of, and we accepted wearing clothes until they wore out. There were no credit cards, many people didn't even have bank accounts.
Now, everyone wants everything whether or not they have the means to pay. Everyone has a car, or more than one, no-one is without a washing machine, tumble drier, flat screen TV, games console and most impressively the latest and most expensive mobile phone. Many people are up to their necks in debt, taking out more credit cards to pay off what they owe until they get to the state when they can no longer pay. Nowadays it seems that debt is a badge of honour and no longer a stigma.
We live in an age of consumerism, driven by the capitalist system that thrives on the perpetuation of greed. By making those at the bottom of the pile think that they are somewhere else if they accumulate the trappings of those at the top, the parasites at the top make sure that the wealth continues to flow in the right direction. The bank accounts of the wealthy, like black holes, suck in more and more gaining a stronger and stronger pull, while the rest of us struggle to keep up. The spiral intensifies and sooner or later the whole edifice must collapse.

The late and the very late

I seem to get annoyed so very easily these days, and by such trivial things. Bigger things don’t seem to bother me in the same way, the big things worry me and concern me but do not irritate me like the trivia do.
One current gripe is TV advertising and the way that they set and describe prices. What once was say five hundred pounds has now become four hundred and ninety nine pounds; irritating enough but when spoken is has become just four nine nine. Is the language becoming digitised along with everything else? I can see no justification for this trend but the practice is firmly embedded now and seems unlikely to change.
Another cause of my discontent lies in the media as a whole, and refers to perpetrators of crimes and also their victims. It seems now that should you be unfortunate enough to be murdered, robbed, raped or pillaged, you are judged according to your way of making a living. Beth Scroggins is never referred to as simply Beth Scroggins, she has to beBeth Scroggins, solicitors clerk. Why? Why not beth Scroggins, lovely girl, or Beth Scroggins stamp collector, or even just plain and simple Beth Scroggins. I once saw an ad in a local Portsmouth paper, offering a job in a Tampax factory as a fitter. Imagine that. It would be bad enough being murdered but then being referred to as Bill Sykes, tampon fitter would compound the misery.
We as a society seem obsessed with success that is measured in terms of our earning potential, and in the eyes of the press our worth is not in who we are but in what we do to make a living. When I am murdered, probably for irritating the wrong person, will I be reported as unemployed or as a retired teacher, ex farm hand, ex factory worker, ex fruit picker, ex Portsmouth Football club sweeper, ex barman or what? I think that Corpse would be more appropriate.

Cheese on toast

I love to cook. When i go out to eat, I find myself analysing the dishes that I enjoy and trying to work out the ingredients and the methods used by the chef. I then take those ideas and attempt to replicate them at home. I read cookery books and steal ideas from them too, but when it comes to cooking, I rarely follow a recipe. I see cooking as a creative art and love to invent and tweak dishes. Mostly it works quite well and most people consider my food acceptable at worst. Good food need not be expensive, and most things that I prepare are done on a low budget.
Not long ago, I went with the family to Pizza Hut for lunch. I am renowned for my attitude to pizza, which I often refer to as cheese on toast, which fundamentally it bears a striking resemblance to, though in the latter there is more cheese. A pizza may look wonderful when it arrives at the table, but my word what a mark up in price. A handful of dough is flattened, baked and smeared with tomato slurry, various scraps are thrown on and the whole thing is baked again for a few minutes, and for that you can pay up to ten pounds. A rapid analysis suggest that the ingredients could cost up to a pound, unless of course you are buying in bulk, in which case you can probably halve that. Ok they taste nice but why are we prepared to pay such inflated prices for something so simple?
Try lightly toasting some bread, smearing it with tomato puree, sprinkling some grated cheese, some chopped olives or anything else that takes your fancy, popping it under the grill and voila - faux pizza, cheap and cheerful.

Hair

I have been listening to the soundtrack from Hair. It was a wonderful show, and in the sixties it was full of hope, colour, freshness and melody as well as protest and pathos.
The 1960s did seem a time when a generation looked at the rotten world of politics and through protest, both physical and in song, hoped to change the world for the better. Let the sun shine in was the mantra and many believed that it would happen.
Yes some changes did take place, there was a break away from the previous generation and the greyness of post war life. Pop music became a phenomenon, fashions and lifestyles slowly changed and there was a sense of liberation and optimism that now seems so misplaced.
The planet is still polluted, there are more wars going on than ever, black people are still seen as inferiors by huge parts of the American population, ignorance and apathy are rife, and still the politicians bleat on about how much better their policies are than others.
We are in a worse mess than we were post war. Yes then the country was in deep debt, the population living largely in basic accommodation and yet there was that ray of hope that things would get better. It seems now that things can only get worse, and still the men in suits are making decisions that feather their own nests at the cost of the rest of us as well as the planet upon which we depend. It is not the planet that needs saving, it is us.

Gender issues

I am a little weary of hearing that women get a raw deal, of glass ceilings and of sexual inequality. In my humble opinion, women get a pretty good deal these days and in so many ways are advantaged rather than the reverse.
There was a time when this was not the case, women had to struggle to gain what they have today and in doing so, have brought about huge changes in society, which while being of benefit to women in general have not necessarily improved the society in which we live.
Our education system changed even before the advent of the National Curriculum, in order to shift the balance in favour of girls. There was a time when boys were higher achievers in many subjects in schools. This was recognised and strategies employed that disadvantaged boys and enhanced the achievements of girls. Now, more or less across the board, girls achieve greater academic levels than boys. This of course follows through into the fields of further and higher education with more girls gaining qualifications than boys, with all of the consequences that follow. Has anyone noticed how many police chiefs, doctors, solicitors and heads of educational establishments are women?
The media offers strong positive role models for girls, some more desirable models than others, but nevertheless, a disproportionate amount of presenters, newsreaders and so on are women. In TV drama, women are more often than not presented as strong characters with men presented as being weak and inferior or just downright stupid. The consequences of this will be far reaching and downright dangerous. It seems that the only role models for boys are sportsmen and bland members of boy bands.
Women in the west are so very fortunate. Only this week in Saudi Arabia, after having been given voting rights, a woman has been sentence to public lashing for daring to drive a car. A large proportion of the world population are repressed, subjugated and have plenty to complain about. Maybe those women who shout so loud about equality should count their blessings.